Watson the Wizard: how PSA leader swam from WASA to THA

Industrial relations can be as complicated as human nature can make it, which is very complicated indeed.

Do you remember the story by Edgar Allan Poe called The Purloined Letter? It is the most perfect example of the conflict between perception and reality, and is, of course, the model on which all good detective stories are conceived.

It comes to mind in this context because one of the more difficult issues that arises in industrial relations is conflict of interest.

There was a period in the history of thought, known as an axial age, that lasted about 500 years, when a pandemic of thought swept over the world. Certain people like the Buddha, Lao Tse, Confucius, and Aristotle wrote down their thoughts and each, in their various and as far as I know completely unconnected parts of the world (there was no internet yet), changed the history of human thought.

In the western world, Aristotle was one of them. He wrote about a way of thinking which was divided into physics, ethics and logic.

Physics developed into what we now call science. Ethics is the basis of moral law, governing how things ought to happen but often don’t; and logic, what is often called the laws of reason, or the laws by which observable things actually happen.

It is pretty obvious when you think of it. A cannot be both A and not A at the same time, for example.

In religion, the biblical gospel of Matthew explained it using the words: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.”

The book was not written in English and has been translated by many different people many different times, so these may not be their actual words, but you can get the meaning easily enough.

In industrial relations, it is sometimes explained as: “A person cannot run with the hares and hunt with the hounds.” Which is to say a person cannot genuinely represent conflicting interests simultaneously.

I believe there are similar proverbs in many other professional disciplines, reflecting the contemporary architecture of cultural anthropology called “dualism,” whereby things exist in opposites like mind and matter, good and evil or for me or against me.

Please note, however, that this only applies to logic or reason. There is a subdivision of philosophy that stands on its own called epistemology and, even worse, another called metaphysics which claims to deal with the abstract nature of reality.

Poets and politicians and lawyers will tell you that it all depends on how you define good or evil.

Which brings us to conflicts of interest in industrial relations. In dispute handling there are usually two different interests, that of the company, which is a conglomerate of functions, and that of the trade union, which is a conglomerate of employees.

It is important to make a distinction where there are differences, since other interests also come into the outcome of any dispute, such as the interests of the communities of which they are part, on the one side (all employed people will be affected by an award, not just one aggrieved individual) and on the other side, all companies in the community employing people (and, in accordance with the IRA, the economy as a whole).

The employer represents the interests of the company, and the trade union represents the interest of people defined as “the workers,” a distinction that must be made since most managers and “employers” are also people employed by the company, just as the workers’ representatives are people employed by the trade union. This is an important distinction to keep in mind.

It normally is.

Except when it comes to Watson (Duke) the Wizard, who, in addition to his prowess in persuading people of his ability to physically paddle the passage from Tobago to Trinidad in a matter of 20 minutes, managed to be both the substantive assistant manager of employee relations of the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) and openly on secondment as the head of a union, the Public Services Association (PSA), which represents the WASA employees. He did it for 15 years.

I guess, like Poe’s Purloined Letter, the conflict of interest between those roles was hidden in plain sight for so long that no one noticed it. They just defined the terms differently, as lawyers do.

But his is not the only case where a conflict of interest arose and was ignored. He may have been a role model for others, who over the years, held more than one government income-paying position at the same time.

Two instances came to mind of men who held substantial government-appointed chairs of state boards and maintained their positions as heads of trade unions. One was even a senator who, contrary to Chapter Four section 42(2) (a) of the Constitution, chaired several such boards.

He used to remind me of an African delegate I once met at an International Labour Organization (ILO) conference in Geneva. He was a tall, handsome, massive, imposing man referred to as Chief, who always wore magnificent robes and was the workers’ representative on his country’s delegation.

When a colleague asked him how he could be the workers’ representative he replied: “Easy. I own 300 workers.”

Now there is a conflict of interest for you!

And in TT, for 15 years no one asked the Wizard how he could hold a managerial position in human resources for WASA, and at the same time hold the position of head of the union that represented the workers he had to bargain for.

It was a classic "himself bargaining with himself" position. I wonder what he did when company and union disagreed, and he had to argue with himself?

He appears, from press reports, to be able to ignore logic, so will possibly adopt conflict of interest to the governance of Tobago if Tobago House of Assembly (THA) Chief Secretary Farley Augustine allows him to get away with it.

Will he be able to switch over to metaphysics where, following the precepts of an alternate reality, he can be both a full-time WASA manager and a full-time THA leader at the same time?